Approaching Oblivion (Jezebel's Ladder Book 4)

by Scott Rhine

So he could hear what she said, Yvette had to remove one of his earbuds. Mercy’s voice played through the earpiece. It resounded with his wife’s gentle, self-deprecating laugh, the one that escaped when she made a mistake in the reading.

  “It’s just me,” Yvette said when she startled him.

  “I was trying to see if Mercy and I could both fit in the chamber together. It’s too small,” Lou complained.

  “You need to rest if you’re going to be of any use to us as a pilot tomorrow.”

  “All that effort to keep her healthy, and the bloody birthday cake gave her diabetes.”

  “It’s more complicated than that. She’s been playing the damn martyr for weeks, trying to give the baby the best chance possible. Part of that is my fault. I’ve been so busy that I took Mercy at her word too often.”

  Lou tried to put his earplug back in. Mea culpa changed nothing for him.

  Yvette placed a hand on his. “Maybe we could set up a second cot in the medical bay now that she’s asleep, if you promise not to disturb her.”

  “Okay,” he said, standing so fast that he nearly knocked her over. She escorted him back to sick bay and dragged his bedroll onto the floor. He curled up at his wife’s feet and fell asleep listening to the sounds of their past.

  Yvette went directly to Red’s room and knocked at the door jamb. When the door opened, Red wore the top to Zeiss’ pajamas and a neoprene headpiece lined with a material that dampened mental assaults. Yvette whispered, “I was going to ask to borrow that cap so I could sleep. Lou is heading for the deep end.”

  Red nodded. “He’s been broadcasting his emotions like a police siren all night. I had to dig this gadget out to sleep.” She peeled the protective device off, tangling her hair in the process. On the walls of the Zeiss bedroom, Sojiro had used a dozen photos to paint a wraparound mural of the South Pacific beach where the couple had spent their honeymoon. Inside, Red had her computer pad set to sea-surf sounds to mask noises from rest of the ship. In hushed tones, the pilot said, “I suppose I can start work early today. Lou’s not quite so loud now. I’ll do the preflight checks for him and set up Snowflake with his preferences. If Mercy dies, he’s going to kill himself before her body’s cold.”

  “Maybe we can prevent that if we can focus him on the baby.”

  Handing her the headgear, Red said, “That’s tomorrow’s problem. As my grandmother used to say, you look like forty miles of bad road. Get to bed.”

  I could with one of those injections I’ve been giving Mercy. “I can’t sleep alone, not here.”

  Laughing, Red said, “Maybe you should slip into my sheets. I’d give a million bucks to see the look on Z’s face when he woke up with a different blonde empath in his bed.” Everyone knew that Red was the only woman Zeiss had ever slept with, and then only after marriage. The former professor avoided even the appearance of impropriety. “He’d never be able to give Lou shit again about drinking so much that he couldn’t remember where he’d left his motorcycle.”

  Yvette stifled her own laugh as she wiggled the shower cap over her own hair. “Actually, Herk kept moving the Ducati on him as a joke. We were all in on it.”

  Eyebrows raised, Red said, “You kept a secret?”

  “Someone told me as a part of our weekly wellness session. I could consider it privileged information.”

  Red said, “I’ll hang out in the guest room with you until Sojiro arrives. Then he can guard you while he sketches. Auckland or a rotating crew member usually takes the other bunk. There’s a partition between the sides, and Sojiro keeps the place so neat that I’m told it’s almost like a hotel.”

  “Deal. Thank you,” Yvette replied. “I know I can be a pain. As soon as Mercy is back in stasis, I’m out of here.”

  “Please, in the list of high-maintenance women on this trip, you are nowhere near the top.”

  What seemed like minutes later, Yvette awoke, refreshed. Voices chatted outside her open door. Someone had tucked her in and placed a covered breakfast tray beside the bed. A note card in Yuki’s handwriting said, ‘Meet me at the chapel Wednesday after breakfast. We need to talk, for Mercy’s sake.’ That was two days away, the next time the technician wasn’t on call as a planner.

  Odd. Yuki hadn’t seemed overtly religious. Maybe Mercy’s plight made her desperate. Yvette also couldn’t imagine the Japanese woman being so domestic. Park might be a settling influence, but there were nasty jokes circulating about the woman’s inability to cook. The nurse lifted the lid with trepidation. Inside the cover was a capped bulb of soy milk, a second bulb full of orange juice, a bowl of dried fruit-and-grain muesli, and one of Johnny’s muffins. She moved the orange juice aside, having been drugged once using this method.

  After she finished her meal and the discussion died down, she crept out to exchange the orange juice for coffee. Yvette noted that the label over Yuki’s room now read, ‘Park.’ In the break room, the two lovers sat side-by-side. Yvette said, “Thanks for breakfast. Is there something we should know about the new nametag?”

  “I’m trying it on,” Yuki replied with uncharacteristic shyness.

  “Mmm-hmm. Does this have anything to do with why you wanted to visit the chapel?”

  Eyes darting toward Park, Yuki said, “Let’s just say recent events have made me reexamine my beliefs.”

  Park looked like the proverbial canary-eating cat. The coffee was almost empty, so the nurse made more—her primary duty of late.

  When Yvette passed through to sick bay, Lou shouted, “My boy, Stu, might be born in orbit around the first inhabited world we discovered.” Lying in his control harness, Lou tapped a few midair icons no one else could see.

  At least he’s focusing more on the baby and work now. Yvette said, “I’ll go check on the boy in question. If you want, Sojiro offered to make a 3-D model of the ultrasound.”

  “Nah, I’ll wait and hold the real thing,” Lou decided. “You can post the pictures, though, to make everyone else jealous.”

  Zeiss announced over ship channels, “I’m resetting the dominoes to flight configuration in ten minutes, eliminating the elevator. Anyone who doesn’t want to spend the next six hours in the saucer needs to disembark now.”

  “Closing solar shutters in sequence,” Lou said. “They should have just enough light to walk home. Be underground for this one, boys and girls, it’s going to be a scorcher.”

  Chapter 16 – Approaching Oblivion

  The central Snowflake interface had six radial spokes, one dedicated to each planner. Yuki nestled in her control harness with all the inputs turned off. Only the blind man in the couch next to hers had sufficient dampers to gaze into the heart of the twin suns and not be harmed. The other crew members were already strapped into cots or chairs. Before they transitioned to normal space, Lou’s last words over the radio were, “Assume the position, and no chatter.”

  Almost immediately after entering the Oblivion system, Lou’s high-gravity turns triggered alarms and the walls opened into emergency acceleration couches. Earthenware jars clinked together in the dining hall. Someone cursed when a loose computer pad smacked them in the face. Lou snapped, “Quiet!” Everyone could hear the frenzied edge of desperation in his voice.

  After five minutes, the pilot said, “You should be able to move around the ship with care. Be ready to grab something solid for the next hour, just in case. Yuki, keep fleshing out our picture of the system while I finish steering us out of this hell. Damn, these tides are strong.”

  Yuki obeyed, using gravity sensors only, not visuals. On the overhead display bubble, glowing, blue lines outlined their projected path through the gravitational tides in the area. To most people, the result resembled a weather map, but the pilots in the room sucked in a breath.

  Red blurted, “You just ran class five rapids, Lou. Great job.”

  “B4 rotates the planet in a clockwise direction, and the moon has a bit more mass than Earth,” Yuki recited. “The fifth moon rotates the opposite way, complicating
our approach.”

  “I’ll do the fine adjustments later,” Red soothed. “Steady as she goes.”

  Her job done for the moment, Yuki climbed out of her control bed and saw Lou’s clenched knuckles. When Park flew, he liked classical music, like a surgeon in an operating theater. Everyone had different mechanisms to cope with stress. To be helpful, she asked, “Do you want some music to stay alert?”

  “No. The only time I listen to music is to set the mood or cover the sounds of something else,” Lou said suggestively.

  Over ship channels, Mercy asked, “Would it help if I read to you for a while?” Even drugged to the gills, she could feel her husband’s distress.

  “I can never get enough of you, babe,” he replied.

  Red agreed, “I think we’d all appreciate a little distraction.”

  The pregnant woman read from a popular book about a magic school over the loudspeaker to help morale. It felt as if they were camped by a roaring fire in the Hollow. Zeiss fixed the Olympus version of hot cocoa and passed around bulbs of the caffeinated beverage. After three hours of entertaining, Mercy had to sleep, but they were through the worst.

  When Lou crawled out of the harness, dripping sweat, Park had to catch him.

  Yvette rushed to check him over objectively. “His pulse and respiration are normal—for someone who has just run a marathon. Get him fluids, and make him sit till he calms down.”

  The wrung-out pilot said, “I can sit by Mercy.”

  “You’ll only frighten her if you go in looking like this. Tell him, Red.”

  However, Red was already under her control hood. “Park, I don’t think I’m going to make four hours fighting this beast. Be ready to switch with me in two. Opening the lens to minimum aperture. Yuki, yell me what else I need to adjust for.”

  Happy to be needed, Yuki climbed back into her harness. She relayed revised statistics on planetary sizes and paths, plus a number of lesser bodies in the system, correcting some earlier assumptions they made about the Oblivion system. She placed all the new data into their modeling program, and Red adjusted their heading accordingly.

  By the time Park had his shift, Yuki’s official duties were done, but she stuck around to perform minor flight attendant duties for her lover. She anchored a nightstand to the lacework struts between control beds and strapped his computer pad to the side of his couch. Park wasn’t expected to change the ship’s heading, but he had to be within reach of the control hood in case an emergency came up. She played chess with him on the tiny, magnetic board he had brought from Earth on the shuttle.

  While they played, Yuki brooded about Mercy’s unseen robot monitor. There would no longer be snow flurries to highlight them in the growing warmth of the habitat. When she met with Yvette, she would need to scan the area for the signs of Heisenberg-adapted cloaks. Hopefully, there would be no Magi eavesdroppers in the barn, and she could converse with Yvette in privacy. If I find evidence of a listener, then what? The monitors didn’t appear very big. The heavy, blending armor and some sort of hover system had to take up most of their volume. What remained was probably a small, vulnerable agricultural robot. Surely, that’s why the Magi confiscated our weapons.

  If it was the same thick, ceramic material that lined the landing bay, Yuki’s punch dagger might not penetrate the armor. As a skilled technician, she could rig some sort of emergency weapon out of the parts in the computer lab, but first she would need to be able to see the target. Sojiro’s airbrush paint would make the perfect revealer. In her head, she designed a deployment system that would spray a fine mist along a wide arc. With the thaw brought on by dual suns, Sojiro would be able to resume painting in the barn, and she could volunteer to carry the equipment down tomorrow.

  For a defensive weapon, Yuki decided on a Taser because the thought of explosives made her ill. She could still smell the burning flesh and taste the tang of blood from her own accident. Focusing on the magnetic chess pieces, she envisioned one of the spare magnetic clamps from Risa’s workbench. That should anchor well to a robot. Steel fishing line was popular with the men and easily borrowed. Then she would only need to design a capacitor to store and discharge enough power for one jolt. If no ghost presented itself, she could put every piece of equipment back undamaged. No one would be the wiser.

  While she was distracted, Zeiss had camped out, watching their game. When she conceded, the commander announced, “I think Yuki would be better suited to Go. It may feel less limiting. She seems to be excited by reversals and sudden thrusts.”

  Park made his trademarked ‘hmm’ face at the unintended innuendo, causing Yuki to burst out laughing.

  As the men put the chessboard away, Yuki carried the drink bulbs to the dining hall for cleaning. On the way by, she discovered that the sick-bay light was out. A check confirmed that Mercy was already in stasis, and Lou was on his second beer.

  Back in her own room, she attacked Park out of a profound sense of gratitude for what she still possessed. At first he protested that he was too tired and others might overhear. Then he deferred, saying, “Do you really think a beautiful woman like you would have given me a second glance outside this mission?”

  That became a personal challenge. First she put back her hair with the birthday ribbon. Arranging her borrowed swath of fabric like a mini-skirt and slipping off her uniform pants, she said, “Pretend I’m Jessica, a bartender at a strip club, and you’re my college astronomy teacher. Your subject is very hard.”

  “I don’t fail anyone if they truly put forth effort.”

  “Oh, I came to class every day and sat in the front row. I smiled at you a lot.” She demonstrated her eager coed pose atop the low dresser.

  Eyes roving over her, Park gulped. “I don’t date students.”

  “No. I got a D minus, but I passed. When we meet at the campus grocery store that summer, I let you know I’m very grateful. You could stop by when I’m working, and I’ll give you a freebie.”

  He wasn’t so tired anymore, but even in fantasies, he was shy. He couldn’t go to the club during operating hours. Her dorm room wouldn’t look right for a teacher. She had to ask for help carrying bags of supplies and a ride to the bar where she worked. Eventually, she seduced him by having him repeatedly opt for the polite and socially acceptable thing. In the fantasy, the bouncer came into the club, trapping them in the women’s room together. They could do anything they wanted in the room as long as the bouncer didn’t hear. She had several other scenarios in mind for Jessica after she had lowered Park’s inhibitions.

  ****

  The control-room crowd thinned out by the time Yuki snuck into the control room for duty near noon on Tuesday.

  Still on from the early shift, Sojiro said, “Sure, now she’s quiet.”

  “Who the hell is Jessica?” asked Red on the way back from the lunchroom.

  Yuki adjusted her hair and pretended Park hadn’t shouted during the role-playing. “Sometimes Woo Jin talks in his sleep.”

  “I heard you weren’t letting him sleep,” Sojiro muttered. “This is the first time he ever skipped our workout. The poor man was completely dehydrated as well as exhausted.”

  Yuki had the decency to blush. Feeling particularly mellow, she ignored the good-natured jibes and gathered detailed information about the first planet in the system. “With the hell we experienced getting into this system, we should name this place Inferno.”

  “Technically, Gehenna is the actual burning place,” Sojiro argued. “And every hell I’ve read about has been easy to get into.”

  Red said, “Planet A should begin with the letter A.”

  “We’ll run out of A words before we get home,” Sojiro complained.

  Lou was still in his pajamas in the break room. He was having trouble adapting to life without Mercy again, but he surprised everyone by contributing. “The entry hall to hell is called Acheron in Dante’s Inferno. Each orbit would be a different ring of hell. The outer planet could be the frozen lake of Treachery, b
ut that would make the place we’re going the ring where they bury suicides.”

  “Not a good omen. How do you know all this stuff?” asked Sojiro.

  “He started as a philosophy major to get a maximum of wine, women, and song,” Yuki explained. “He probably tutored quite a few young ladies.”

  “Eventually, we have to name a planet after Quan,” Red said, reminding them of the first astronaut to be killed by an Icarus field. His only request for this sacrifice had been to have his name immortalized. Unfortunately, the incident was still classified.

  Yuki shook her head. “I don’t think he’d want this rock. Besides, it has a needle-shaped moon the size of Phobos. What would we name that? Quan didn’t have any family.”

  “We need a theme. Show us the image of B4, where we’re doing the test,” Red ordered.

  With a few waves of her hands, both real and artificial, Yuki brought up all available telescope images at extreme range. “It’s not even round. The gravitational pull from the parent planet has distorted it like an egg. The surface is a maze of stress cracks and canals.”

  “That’s it—a maze to test us. We can call the moon Labyrinth,” Lou announced. “That would make the big gas planet Daedalus. What would we call the other moons? He only had two kids. I forget their names.”

  By then, Sojiro had pulled up a reference on his computer pad. “Icarus and Iapix. He also had a nephew apprentice with him by the name of Perdix or Calos, and one he killed by the name of Talus.”

  “The one he murdered could be the one that orbits him the wrong way,” Yuki joked.

  “I suppose you could say the labyrinth was one of his children, too. That takes care of this planet,” said Red. “We can call the planet that gets us into the labyrinth with her needle Ariadne. What do we name the outer planet?”

  “Minos?”

  “Wasn’t King Minos one of the judges of the dead in the underworld?” Sojiro asked after a few more keystrokes.

  “You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting some kind of bad omen in mythology,” Lou complained. “What about Theseus, the little planet with the nexus that leads us out?”